Vision Mechatronics used the India Battery Show to launch a product called Relive: a high voltage second life battery, built in association with JSW MG Motor India, which Dr Rashi Gupta describes as the first of its kind in the country.
Circularity gets one sentence from her. The rest of the argument is about a price band.
Indian storage buyers, as she sets it out, sit on one side of a gap. At one end there is lead acid with the traditional inverters that go with it. At the other end there is lithium. Commercial, industrial and residential customers look across at the lithium end and find it capital heavy, a phrase she picks deliberately in place of expensive, and they stay where they are. The gap is what stops the adoption, not the technology.
A repurposed pack sits inside that gap. Something close to first life performance, at a price band close to the traditional product.
What it also buys is nerve. Buyers who have just watched lithium prices fall steeply are wary of committing at the wrong moment, or of committing to a technology that changes again underneath them. A second life pack, she says, gives them a cushion, a comfort zone that gets them past that barrier.
Gupta started in lithium in 2015, funded out of her existing robotics business, and says everyone told her at the time that she would lose all her money. It was her money, she points out, since the company was bootstrapped. She is, she says, "fondly known as Battery Valley of India".
Cheaper cells do not settle the argument
The standing objection to second life anywhere is that new cells keep getting cheaper, which erodes the discount that makes a repurposed pack worth the trouble.
Gupta expects prices to stabilise as the current geopolitical pressure eases, and does not think the objection is decisive in any case. Her first point is arithmetic: the sourcing cost of a second life pack has already been absorbed by the first life, so a real difference survives. Her second point is about segmentation, and she makes it with coffee. "You get coffee at the roadside stalls also and you get coffee at Starbucks also." Every product has somebody to take it. The work is finding which segment the product fits.
Hers is rural India, plus tier two and tier three cities and the industry sitting in them. She also expects entry barriers in the Indian market to tighten soon, which changes what is available at the bottom of the price range.
What the Indian buyer asks before the specification
Understanding the customer's mindset comes before anything else, she says, and the Indian mindset is not the European one. After that comes the application: what the battery is for, and what problem it is being asked to solve.
The factors that decide a sale, in her order, are price sensitivity, then availability, then trust in the technology. On the EV side she has watched that last one shift. The worry used to be range anxiety. Now it is charging anxiety. On the storage side price, availability and trust are all still live, and trust has been sharpened by fires around the world.
She is impatient with how those fires get explained. Thermal runaway, she says, is a description rather than a root cause. Why there was a thermal runaway, and what led to it inside the battery, is the question worth asking. In twelve or thirteen years in the battery business, she says, her own systems have not produced a fire in a warranty claim.
Her answer on cost follows from the same reasoning. A low cost battery with no cooling, no ventilation and no temperature cut-offs, sitting in a desert at 50 to 60 degrees, will not perform, and the whole investment is gone. A slight premium for a system that can withstand those temperatures buys another ten years of operation, which is the better return. What she wants buyers to price is value rather than the number on the invoice.
Standards get written well and implemented badly
Gupta works on standardisation with UL, with the Bureau of Indian Standards and with IEC, and her criticism is not of the documents.
The standards are good. The implementation is not, and the compulsion to apply them is missing at every layer. Her example is what followed India's EV fires: investigations, reports from NITI Aayog, DRDO and other national authorities, and then mandatory changes. The sequence is what she objects to, because the standards that would have prevented the incident were already written. "Let's go into the preventive mode rather than into the corrective mode."
Everything in the battery except the cell
The localisation debate in India tends to be a debate about cells. Gupta opted out of it.
Vision Mechatronics began in 2015 with a German collaboration, and her proposal to that partner was to build in India. They agreed, and the company has manufactured in India and supplied Europe, the US and other markets since. The decision she describes as playing the game smartly was to leave cell manufacturing alone and to build on the strengths she had: electronics, software, assemblies and system design for the storage system as a whole. Everything in the battery except the cell is now made in India.
That includes the BMS. She claims the first indigenously designed and made active balancing BMS in India, sold into European and American markets. It also includes the monitoring layer, which the company has run since 2017: with enough data, she says, it can predict three months in advance that a pack is going to go bad. IoT went into her batteries in 2015, which she notes with some satisfaction is well before the current conversation about it.
Cumulative volume is close to three gigawatt hours.
The gap she points at is not cells but the machinery for making them, much of which is imported from neighbouring countries and could be built domestically. India can make safe systems for itself and for export, is her conclusion, "making India for the world".
The service team she had to build from scratch
Skilled engineers and diploma holders for this sector are not there to be hired, so Gupta trained young women from industrial training institutes instead.
They were frightened of the equipment, because everyone tells them batteries catch fire. Her response was to send them out anyway and stay on the phone with them, despite having service teams available, on the argument that the technology exists to put her on the other end of the line from anywhere. Today that team handles field service better than the technicians she could otherwise get, and travels to sites in rural India that can be two days away.
Then she changed the products around the same problem. The systems are designed so that a customer, of any age or strength, can do a first aid repair unsupervised. Fuse boxes open like a drawer: put the fuse in, close it, press the button, the system restarts. During COVID, when reaching a site required permissions and days of travel, she talked a woman on site through replacing a fuse that had blown after lightning struck the solar panels.
The connectors got the same treatment after women told her they were too heavy and bulky to push in and out, and too tight. The model was changed.
Her broader point is about who has been doing the designing. Products, services and training courses have been built by men, and the fix has to reach academia as well as industry. The conversation also has to happen twice over, once with young women considering the sector and once with their parents, who still believe electricity is a laborious industry to work in. Gupta, who sits on the United Nations Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition and says she is the only Indian woman on it, was at a CEO roundtable at the same show where a show of hands found three women in the room.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.